The Hollywood-centric “Membership First” faction that has controlled the Screen Actors Guild’s national board for most of the last five years chooses tactics—misinformation, tough talk and over-promising—that undermine the union’s credibility.

Someone call Dan Brown: French painting experts have discovered faint drawings on the back of Da Vinci’s painting “The Virgin and Child With St. Anne” at Paris’ Louvre Museum, including a sketch of a skull. Intrigue abounds!

Here’s a news bite that could have written itself a few weeks, if not months, ago: Barack Obama is Time’s 2008 Person of the Year. Even the magazine’s editorial staff members knew that the choice would hardly shock anyone, but they allowed themselves to be swept along by the tides of history—or perhaps inevitability.

Whereas during boom times not so long ago, the über-loaded were all about having it and flaunting it, some among their ranks are now feeling the need to tone down their spending habits, if only for the sake of appearances.

The death and destruction from last month’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai are still fresh in the minds of many, but filmmakers in India nevertheless are rushing to retell the events cinematically, with over 20 Mumbai-themed movies already awaiting approval.

Long before Madonna, Dita Von Teese or any number of aspiring sirens squeezed into their first corsets, there was proto-vixen Bettie Page, who brought her own racy sensibility to the art of pinup photography in the 1950s.